Mia Troy-Vowell has taken her love of dogs to a whole other level, starting Oh My Dog, an doggie day care, retail and obedience school in South Burlington. / RYAN MERCER, Free Press

Written by

Andrea Kay, Gannett

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I always ask someone who’s been working awhile and wants to change careers: How did you end up in your profession?

I almost always get the same response. ”I just fell into it.”

”It wasn’t really a decision based on anything other than it seemed like a good idea at the time when I got offered a job in the field,” one man who has been in financial analysis told me recently.

I also ask recent graduates who haven’t found a job: What made you choose your particular course of study? I almost always get a version of this: ”I didn’t know what else to major in.”

The other day an unemployed graduate told me, ”I studied communication for no particular reason other than the credits made sense and I would be able to get my degree faster.”

As they look back, some workers and would-like-to-be-workers speculate that something or someone influenced them at a young age. But they conclude that they didn’t think it through when it came to choosing their profession.

My friend Morry was a dentist for 36 years.

”I didn’t have a very good reason for becoming a dentist,” he once told me. ”I was 13 or 14, and I liked my dentist. He was one of the few male influences in my life. My parents were divorced. He’d make a big fuss over me when he’d see me. He wore a white coat. It was prestigious.”

It seems many people make important life decisions by ”sliding” as opposed to ”deciding,” a term that research professor Scott Stanley at the University of Denver coined to describe how many cohabitating relationships come into existence.

Research in that area finds that more than half of cohabitating couples don’t go through any type of deliberate decision process when choosing to move in together.

My observation about workers is not based on scientific research about how they choose a career or educational focus. But based on what they’ve been saying to me for 25 years, it sure seems like a lot of sliding vs. deciding goes on.

A good deal of work needs to be done to choose a career for good reason: Finding work that fits who you are entails a search of yourself.

What exactly are you searching for?

1. An understanding of your greatest strengths: These are the things that you do well and enjoy doing today, in past jobs and in life in general. Understanding this helps you build on that — possibly leverage it into a new career — and better formulate what kind of work you want to do.

2. An understanding of what you care about: These are issues, trends, causes and problems that matter to you. When it comes to work, most people don’t even consider this. Yet doing work that revolves around something you care about is one of the most crucial parts of having a meaningful and satisfying career.

3. An understanding of your values and personality: These are the things that make you you. Knowing this helps you identify themes and patterns that give you insight into where you thrive. How do others describe you? How do past managers describe you in performance reviews? Do you need a lot of autonomy? Are you patient and caring?

Yes, this takes time and work to figure out.

But if you don’t ask yourself the hard questions, it could mean not just sliding but colliding with a career that is at complete odds with who you are.